Using Thunderbird to Pop Just about Anything

[dgood]

First of all for all of you who don't know Thunderbird is a third party program for checking your email from the makers of Firefox so you know it's good. It is just like Outlook except seems to be more compatible over all and easier to set up in my opinion. I just today found a few walk-through's that can get your hotmail/windows live beta/gmail/any web-based email to pop just like school emails would and other things.

Thunderbird can be used to check any normal email that is from your isp or school already and it is simple enough to enable as long as your server supports it. Gmail (though not an isp/school) is a web-based that doesn't need the plugin to work because gmail already has pop support for it in the options in gmail. It even lists the ports (999 and 587).

Now Real pain web based such as windows live beta/hotmail can be used with the WebMail extension for Firefox. There are also optional (needed) plugins for each of the various web-based ones such as yahoo and lycos and hotmail as already mentioned. You will probably have to save link to desktop as it will try to install into Firefox but it's made for Thunderbird but if you go to extensions in Thunderbird and click install and find the file it'll load right up for you.

This page was posted by a guy from the University of Idaho who got it all working and wanted to share it with us at the University who were pissed about the change from sun to microsoft e-mail. I'd tried this plugin before but failed to do it correctly. This is a good example of what exactly to do. Between this and the instructions on the actual WebMail web page you should be able to get it working and if you have any questions pm me or just post here and I can try to help you through it or post some of my own pictures of exact settings.

EDIT: Added some pictures of my set up for those that need a little more help.




Also for those that want to use the hotmail smtp server you have to not be in windows live beta you have to revert to regular hotmail mode or it will not allow you to use the smtp in the plugin. so make sure you change back. so you can click hotmail instead of live beta in the plugin. You can still check email on live beta but not send from it without changing that.

[dgood]

Newest Versions of this work for windows live also. you just have to make sure your username is set as your full email address not just the first part. Everything else works the same.

[stev]

Like your avatar says ..... Ooooooooooo! That is something really handy.

This almost pushes me to use Thunderbird over AOL, Juno, NetZero, and Yahoo mail. However, I have no idea how POP works nor how to find out what POP setup is needed to pull mail from those services into Thunderbird.

[ibleet]

Very good info. indeed....Thanks

[stev]

Hmmm, after looking over some of those posted links in the original post, I found out that AOL can use the webmail interface into Thunderbird.

Also, upon searching, Juno uses a webmail from the site webmailb.juno.com, but isn't listed as a supported mailer. But, according to searching the web, it's doable via the POP.

Now, to get the time to research this and doing it. This would save sooooooo much time logging into these mail systems to weed through the mail.